protesting outside a supreme court justice s house, it s not illegal to do so. it s illegal to threaten a supreme court justice and the department arrested and prosecuted someone who threatened justice kavanaugh outside his home. but it s not illegal to protest there. it s illegal to enter in an insurrection. there s a lot of apple and oranges comparisons that get made up on the hill. as the attorney general made very clear, if we can find evidence of someone who fire bombed a crisis pregnancy center, we ll very much prosecute them. the difference between those cases and the prosecutions that they have brought of people who have blocked access to abortion clinics is evidence. they have evidence, they can see the people who have blocked access to abortion clinics. the fire bombing of this crisis pregnancy center happened in the middle of the night, and they don t have suspects but thore very much investigating it. it goes to that point i said at
proceedingag exceedingly carefully, and they were worried about the political implications of provoking the former president. and all this resulted in very heated battles between the fbi and justice department prosecutors who were advocating a more aggressive strategy to try and retrieve those documents down at mar-a-lago. according to the washington post it was only after a series of intense negotiations with justice department prosecutors that the fbi eventually moved forward with its search 467 and all along the way in spite of all the evidencee to the contrary, the fbi continued to give trump and his legal team the benefit of the doubt. the washington post reports some fbi field agents wanted to shutter the investigation all together in early june after trump s legal team asserted a diligent search had been conducted. but according to the washington post, the just department prosecutors continued to push for a search of mar-a-lago. those prosecutors were ultimately vipdicated
in court in response to a motion filed by mr. trump. it was not a leak. it was not a leak. full stop. that was one of many exchanges from merrick garland s testimony on capitol hill, and we ll have more on what happened in that strange and contentious hearing later on in this hour. one of the consistent themes we ve been hearing from republicans to ted cruz is the idea the fbi is now hell bent on taking down donald trump, the fbi has somehowdo caved to democratic political pressure and is part of a partisan scheme to destroy trump s political process. so it was notable on the very same day as this hearing was happening on capitol hill that we goten this brand new piece o reporting from the washington post in detailing exactly what s happening inside the fbi and justice department ahead of last summer s search of stmar-a-lago. and that reporting makes it clear thator the fbi had, in fa,
questioning on the hoyle about this story say you siped off on this raid, you overrode the desireod by fbi agents. but to put the metainize narrative aside right now on what the implications of this story on present investigations iy wonder if you could break dn a little bit of the dynamic we see playing out in this piece, which is the doj worked so intently to propose it is an s apolitical organization and that the fbi works without politics, you know, on the landscape. but what becomes abundantly clear in this account and to be honest in other ones in trying to be apolitical the justice department sometimes makes very political decisions. is that a fairpo assessment? you know, i ll give you a defensive response, which i don t think that s a fair assessment. and i certainly that s not the take away i have with this
were political debates and political ret tribution there were also genuine mistakes made in the course of those investigations that the fbi paid the fact. after and so i certainly don t discount the justice department concerns that too much of the fbi s caution was based on the idea of political blow back. but i also think you have to keep in mind that there were inspector general reports that weree starkly sharply criticalf how c the fbi did past investigations of this type of profile. and so what you see in these back and forth, what our reporting shows is that there s a degree of really different approach, so much so that back in may even before the subpoena is sent for these documents some of the justice department officials want to do a search then, and the fbi thinks that s a bad idea, and then they get cooperation from the trump side, and the debate is how much is